"You have an excellent opportunity to use your homosexuality,"
Dean Hannotte counseled me one weekday evening in April 1973 as
we talked in a cozy East Village apartment, which looked more
like a library than a residence. It even sported a table chess
set with playable, Staunton pieces. Dean then reassured me that
getting older was nothing to worry about; after all, his own
lover, psychotherapist Paul Rosenfels, was 35 years his senior. I
remember asking him about diseases, whether the lifestyle was
"unhealthy," and he said no, because to "grow," I would
eventually want to stay with one partner for life. That half-hour
session with Dean provided me with my first credible, encouraging
information about my recently discovered community, beyond the
world of fern and leather bars, and tacky GAA dances at the
Wooster Street "Firehouse."

I had seen the right ad in the Village Voice,
something like, "homosexuality is more than sex." I could go to a
new social center on East 9th Street, seven nights a week, and
meet intact young men in a somewhat sheltered, non-competitive
setting with Dean, Paul, and several other of Paul's
"students."

Soon, I would take a new job in New York City and move in, to
a modest but modern apartment a ten-minute walk from the Center.
As I was leaving the old job (Univac), a manager asked, most
inappropriately, "Bill, I'm curious about your personal motive
for moving right into New York City."

Many nights I would step down into the basement "loft,"
cheerfully carpeted and painted in oranges and yellows, with
chairs arranged in a circle for talk sessions and a kitchenette
in the back. A "secret" passageway led to a second room for
simultaneous counseling sessions. Several nights a week, various
Center students facilitated Open Talk Groups. The Center
sponsored a male nude drawing class, an acting class, and, for a
while, a creative writing class. Saturday nights, each week
reached a climax with the pot-luck supper, an incredible spread
containing many of Paul's unusual dishes, like chicken aspic,
which he and his pupils spent entire Saturdays preparing.
"Homosexual," as opposed to "gay" or "lesbian," was the Center's
way of describing a deviant aspiring to personal growth.

Paul had been self-publishing his ideas in a number of
didactic books, the most important of which is
Homosexuality, The Psychology of the Creative Process [1972].
(3)
Paul organized his material into a highly structured message,
with sections called "The Nature of Polarity,"
(4)
"The Psychological Defenses," and "The Creative Process." His writing
style consisted of alternating paragraphs precisely stating and
expanding his principles from "feminine" (roughly
speaking, introverted) and "masculine" (extroverted)
viewpoints. His prose balances itself as if it were verse. He
speaks of "men" generically, without the political correctness of
inclusive language. He superimposes over his notions about the
cultural and psychological significance of homosexuality a
determination to use the scientific method to fully explore human
nature and to develop, in a grassroots, communal setting, a more
human world. He gives no references or footnotes; he writes naked
truth developed using his own inner resources over a lifetime. He
would speak in talk groups of a definitive science of human
nature, with his own relatively sheltered community as a kind of
lab. Philosophers had, however, often alluded to this polarity
concept. For example, Plato spoke of personality "splits" and
"double sort."
(5)
Goethe, in Faust, had referred
to "the eternal feminine," in a passage which Liszt used in the
triumphant male chorus ending his Faust Symphony, and
Mahler, likewise, when ending his Symphony of a Thousand.

The polarity theory, in fact, quickly attracted underground
notoriety among many New York City gay men, as a "heavy"
head-trip of "so much shit," even if it never quite got the
attention of the mainstream media. Polarity obviously originates
in basic biology, where organisms develop both sensory and motor
capacities.
(6)
Polarity surfaces in the animal
world with intriguing sights, such as the possession of bright
colors by many male birds to stake out territory and divert
predators away from nests. Its precepts sound neat enough. Human
beings are psychologically masculine or feminine, regardless of
biological gender. Masculines like verbs and feminines prefer
nouns. Feminines wonder "what" and masculines wonder "how." A son
usually has the opposite polarity of his father. Polarity expands
purely biological meiosis into a universal human touchstone. Some
men would refer to themselves as having both masculine and
feminine components, rather than to one or the other as an
"identity."

Polarity, for Rosenfels, became a vehicle to develop and
define inner identity, that which makes you "who you are."
Psychologist James Hillman achieved a comparable body of science
with his notion of a germinal personality "acorn,"
(7)
the underlying will to express oneself with
some singular purpose and avoid activities which contradict that
purpose. Sometimes identity has a collective components, as when
scientists like Carl Sagan note that our search for
extraterrestrial life is part of our search for who "we" are,
considered together.

The notion of "femininity," or of a "yielding" personality,
seemed like a godsend to me. Love between men could be more than
just the "mutual respect" my Army buddies had once mentioned. Men
did not have to stop at shaking hands. [Masculinity could outgrow
collective loyalties and the recklessness of ignorance without
selling itself out.] I had already found the prospect of
submitting to a great man (almost as if I were a "woman")
incredibly titillating. I scoffed at religious prohibitions
against "yielding to temptation."
Another Center student would relate that he had experienced sex,
and that this had been the most liberating event in his life,
except. . . then what?
In "yielding," I sensed an indirect, if perverse, source of personal
"power," the absolute right to choose the person to whom I would
"submit," and to hold him accountable to living up to my "ideals"
of him. I wanted my ideals to look like men; I took after my
father, who used to scream in revulsion when seeing young men
(ungrateful hippies, he thought) sporting "long hair," like
women's. Carried too far, however, I could soon resent my feeling
of living in another man's shadow. I would just be draining
another person as if I were a vampire, and ought to feel
ashamed.

Paul Rosenfels soon developed his polarity paradigm by adding
a second linearly independent component, "subjectivity"
versus "objectivity." These concepts describe how the
personality operates and approaches achieving its inner goals in
a practical world. "Subjectivity" refers to intuitive and sensory
facilities, the ability to "sense" the importance of things or
undiscovered connections between them; "objectivity" refers to
manipulative capabilities, actually motivating or managing other
people. Center students now tell me that this second duality of
character confused a lot of people over the years, but I think
this second basis component helps to give a perspective on what
makes actual, "live" people tick. The masculine-feminine and
subjective-objective axes formed a system of coordinates
appealing to a mathematician like me; the intellectual precept
could quickly get in the way of deeper understanding through
personal experience. Other concepts of personal character,
expressed as analogues, were: love (or "charity") v. power, faith
v hope, thought v. action, insight v. mastery, truth v. right,
teacher v. leader, honesty (or honor) v. courage (integrity).
(8)

Much more important, though, is what Paul means by
"creativity," which in our culture now closely correlates to
self-motivated deviancy. To get at this, Paul talks about
psychological surplus as a benefit from civilization;
surplus is a unique attribute of human beings. People use their
capacities first to meet adaptive needs, such as providing
food, clothing, and shelter for themselves and their families. In
an advanced society, there is more cooperation and more
"efficiency" in meeting survival needs, and in providing
political stability and security from outside threats. Surplus
even allows people the luxury of emphasizing the processes they
are best at performing. This is called character
specialization. Technology does not have to be an evil that
destroys the planet or magnifies inequities in wealth. It frees
people to live their own lives as they see fit. Rosenfels has
structured his "moral psychology" as a kind of Jeffersonianism,
even if Rosenfels (unlike today's political libertarians) would
have favored sensible use of the political process to deliver
essential services such as clean water and safe bridges.
Telecommunications and self-publishing technology, perhaps
facilitated by corporate restructuring, now facilitate the
expression and debate of daring ideas and the search for truth,
to the discomfort of many people who don't like seeing old
notions of men and women challenged. (Well, male homosexuals like
me like the old notions of what men should look like!)
Technology, though, if not accompanied by spiritual and character
growth, can lead to a society's incineration, or slow, almost
Mayan death through desecration of the planet.

Paul viewed as creative the development of
psychological surplus (one's own feminine or masculine inner
identity) in mated relationships, motivated by a need for
intimate romantic fulfillment, whatever the social support of
others. "Inner identity," means, to me, what makes me tick, how I
communicate what in other people turns me on. Later, during the
military ban debates (Chapter 4), the writings of Steffan and an
interview given by Meinhold (among others) would reinforce this
idea of identity achieved through emotional attachments, to ripen
as "self-image." Creativity and personal growth give one
importance to other people. But one becomes significant to other
people by actually caring about them or motivating them. One does
this with close personal friends and with the achievement of a
mild level of earthy, erotic feeling or action. The ultimate
expression of creativity is to be found in a lifelong mated
monogamous relationship with another loved one, with the full
expression of sexuality. There is tension between the ideal of
lifelong fidelity and the practical likelihood that two
self-actualizing individuals will, in time, "outgrow" a
particular courting relationship. Beyond a single mated
partnership (whether same-sex or not), there are other friends in
a close-knitted community with whom one interacts out of inner
identity. For the creative process to be fulfilled, one must be
open to homosexual feelings and drives, even if they are not
directly acted out. In Paul's world, any person capable of growth
will eventually face homosexual needs; homosexuality is in some
sense "chosen" through a greater personal need for romantic
attachment and peak experience (a term popularized by Maslow),
rather than a biological inevitability. Although personal growth
implies eventual self-expression in homosexual intimacy along the
way, it is much, much more; so a "gay identity" (if we look ahead
to the military ban problem) need not, clinically speaking,
suggest a propensity for frequent expansion into sexuality. But
there is a continuum between affection and eroticism.

Surplus is a uniquely human capability. A stray, self-adopted
cat drops a bird at my apartment door in gratitude, or a
mockingbird repeatedly circles around me after chasing starlings
out of his territory, seems to want to tap into our world where
there are real problems beyond surviving. Creativity is enhanced
when intimacy is openly recognized as possible, but kept in
restraint. Boswell relates that the ancient Greeks recognized a
continuity between friendship and love and sometimes valued
homosexual "relationships" precisely because they were
experienced for their own sakes, beyond procreation and even
beyond physical sex.
(9)

Since becoming more intimate with other people is indeed a
scary experience, people develop psychological defenses,
short circuits to temporary satisfaction through pseudo or
surrogate dominance and submission mechanisms. These came up in
talk groups, when some men would claim a kind of psychological,
perhaps sequential hemaphroditism, with vacillation between
yielding and power ("yang" and "yin", selfhood v. unity) impulse.
I, for example, can gain a certain power over others by my
developing secret insights through my talent for relating various
problems and then sharing my "intelligence" with others in a
selective way knowing that they will behave in certain ways
because of their limiting predispositions combined with
incomplete, and therefore misleading, knowledge. This is called
sadism. Politicians indulge in it all the time.
(10)
Defenses are invoked because growth really
does cause one to change, to molt and to cast away an "old sense
of self," to give up a lot of baby play and childish things, in
order to blossom out as reborn individual. Other important
defensive patterns are (for feminines) compulsiveness,
associated with easy intimidation and a sensation of being
"driven," and (for masculines) obsessiveness. My own NIH
psychiatric records, on one page, suggested a diagnosis of
"compulsive personality," but elsewhere rather inaccurately
described my "obsessive thought patterns."

Activities that conventional society regards as "creative" --
writing books, plays, and music, or acting, or hairdressing --
may in this "human world" be seen as adaptive. These private
pursuits or "hobbies" may be good, because people need to be
alone sometimes, but they fall short of real, direct interaction
with others. Likewise, conventional family responsibilities --
baby-making and parenting -- may also be seen as adaptive; and
this is a shocking (and perhaps offensive) notion. Don't people
grow by taking care of their children? I thought parenting was
something "everybody" did; how could it be special?

By now, I saw how the language of our social interactions,
with family (not person) as its atomic unit, affected the way
most adults saw themselves. Referral to marital spouse and kids
in everyday society, especially the workplace, gave conforming
adults an innocent way to refer to their sexuality. Society,
through both the government and church recognition of marriage
and the corporate policies built upon this recognition, conferred
a permission for sex which most heterosexual adults no longer
recognized as such. Moreover, society conferred a legitimacy to
the totality of a whole adult life, as factored by the
obligations of family. The comforts conferred to conformity
claimed their price. People were so used to familial
identification that they never questioned it. They held opinions
about political or psychological issues according to what
immediate benefit followed the issues for them and their
families, not for what would be true or right in the long run.
They would surrender some of their capacities to think for
themselves, and let their politicians, their labor unions, or
employers' political action committees tell them how to vote
(when they voted at all). A certain measure of mandatory, immoral
ignorance and hypocrisy was required to get along and take care
of your own "kind."

At least, by this time of the 1970's, discrete homosexuals
like me were generally left alone and usually allowed privacy.
They still didn't want us to "talk about it." You didn't
interrupt a business conversation with the announcement, "I'm
gay"; nor did anyone say "I'm heterosexual" when she had spouses
and kids she could mention. I liked it that way; my otherness and
aloofness, almost like that of an alien fallen to a reasonably
hospitable earth, made me feel special. I knew "them" better than
they knew me. The "privacy" that enveloped my life (the mystery
of my anonymity as viewed by others, and my total control of my
personal life) became itself a public expression of a certain
indifference and antipathy to the self-suspension of "normal"
family life. Perhaps this autonomy was a bit of an illusion,
abetted by government programs that often relieved me of having
to deal so much with difficult or impoverished people myself.
Homosexuality would sit at the center of this new independence;
it would become, as one 1973 Ninth Street Center monograph
(11)
put it, "civilization's secret," a
psychological Rosetta Stone for what really made things work, but
a knowledge "of good and evil" too dangerous for the ordinary
world dependent on fidelity to gender roles. Officialdom, the
Nixon-Kissinger world, simply never got around to mentioning it,
as if to derail the credibility of homosexuality with benign (if
intentional) neglect. The "outside world," including most youth,
would simply not be let in on it. During this time, I cherished
my own separatist attitude, that this secret world open to
peak-experiences of romantic fulfillment through sexual intimacy
with an "ideal man," was the only universe that really mattered.
I rather liked the idea of homosexuality being elite -- even
effete -- rather than spoon-fed to all on the theory that we
could so easily stop "discrimination" by mass coming-outs.

"Masculinity" -- as mediated by family adaptation -- indeed
experiences a double twist in our culture. We used to expect
young men to risk their lives out of ignorance of the
consequences of their own recklessness. Then, in the workplace,
we want them to use their "masculinity" to peddle other people's
products and ideas. They are supposed to experience a sense of
"power" in their salesmanship or superficial supervision. They
often don't see how their power gets channeled into false
submissiveness.

I became very jealous in my choices of my own goals. I would
resent exercises like teamwork pep-sessions in the workplace,
with group singing and fun that I saw as false excitement over
goals chosen by others. I could never be a salesman (like my
father), because I hate the idea of using my own "publicity" to
peddle other peoples' ideas (true or not). Likewise, I would come
to see workplace promotions, while financially rewarding, as
hardly fulfilling in personal terms since conventional "career
advancement" wasn't (for me) related to providing for a family. I
eschewed participating in organizing workplace social life, or
even "daughters' days" where fathers would ask their colleagues
to show their daughters their corners of the work-world. On the
other hand, my own private goals, to somehow make my own
upward-looking sexuality more real to others, might be completely
inappropriate and unwelcome. This dilemma grew out of my
subjectivity and the unbalanced(12)
nature of my personality. I sensed my visionary potential but
lacked the focus to achieve the little things. The unbalanced
person is particularly aware of the opportunity to select his own
goals without the approval of others and he may see enforcing his
own choices as a key component of his identity or acorn. The
balanced person may be more in tune with actually reaching
others. I would return to material possessions, private special
things that had always provided "highs" -- my record collection,
for example -- to exercise my "feeling" capacities. This
backsliding away from attention to others, in the eyes of some at
the Center, brought into question whether I "could" grow -- that
is, outgrow this fundamental inertness of my own private world of
feeling. I think my churlish behavior reminded the others of
their own discomfort with the paradox of their "creative world":
they could not develop greater wisdom and freedom without
simultaneously dealing with the humility of really serving
others. Yet, the easy shelter provided by periodic withdrawal
into my private world gave me a certain toughness. Feminines do
not have to be marshmallows.

In later years, I have become more in touch with my own desire
to build a complete intellectual model of my world, to explain
everything, and leave nothing out, the way I would write a final
exam. It doesn't matter so much how many people listen; it may
matter who listens. An unbalanced leader might want to
specify the rules for everything, regardless of whether people
could follow them. A balanced person would be much more concerned
about what idea-segments and presentations could work in a
practical way, get things done, so such a person would probably
feed people what he thinks they can absorb where they are. A
balanced person might make more money!

Center devotees developed the notion that "adaptive" needs
should be made as minimal as possible. Their view of survival
focus stands as a curious antithesis to Luddism: while Center
students welcomed the discipline of simple life, Luddites (as
well as our pioneers in the nineteenth century) regard primitive
survival mechanisms as an actual experience of personal freedom
and human identity (as clumsily stated in the "Unabomber's"
notorious "manifesto").
(13)
Many Center students
lived in the immediate East Village (more "human" than Hell's
Kitchen and not so "upper-class fag" as the West Village) and did
simple jobs, like cleaning apartments or bookbinding. Asking
somebody "What do you do?" to find out who he is, was a no-no.
People would brag that they had not traveled north of 14th Street
in perhaps the last year. Learn to live on very little, they
lectured. "Give up!" Liberation was, for the indefinite future,
to be a "grass-roots," local neighborhood exercise, where you
stayed around people who cared about you. Liberation was also a
"selfish" thing from your immediate community; there was no
reason to sell it to the "outside" world yet. The outside world
already provided a reasonable measure of stability; admission
that national politics really matters was taken as a sign of
powerlessness and intimidation. There was no need to be
politically "radical" -- that is, openly gay on the job or even
with original family members. It was more important to help
others in one's own immediate environment than to volunteer in
socially approved projects that met needs (for example, feeding
impoverished children) recognized as socially or morally
important but less immediately relevant. An unstable, or at least
neutral, equilibrium between psychological self-interest and
giving to others (a bit different from service to others) was
developing in our discussions.

I was put off by this and wanted to grow a foothold in the
"real" world, to assimilate. Paul would say, OK, but I didn't
need to become president of a company (other than my own). I
should help others discern the difference between creative action
and adaptation.

I had first felt relieved to find Center students as "normal"
guys I could identify with; now, some of them came across as men
who really couldn't adapt to the "outside" even if they had to.
If I mentioned their heavy smoking (the air at the Center
sometimes got unbreatheable), they would call me a "health
nut."

In my earliest days, I had felt relieved by the easier things
I heard, like "the sex was great, but the head was nowhere." I
had expected a soft approach to sexual intimacy, but quickly
found my overtures and prattle a bit unwelcome. I felt constantly
compelled to "make progress" towards a "first experience"; yet,
even as I "knew" I was less "attractive" than the men whose looks
aroused me, I was often unaware of my own personal appearance and
thought very little about my own body.

Paul had reassured me that he was very "fond" of me. So I went
to Paul for a single therapy session, a "diagnostic interview,"
to determine whether, as he put it, "you can take the pressure I
would put on you." He challenged me with, "what do you
do?" His prescription was to get out and do things for other
people, like wash the dishes after the Saturday night potlucks.
Well, I volunteered to do that -- Dean even hugged me once I
started to "help"; but I did it when I felt like it, not every
Saturday. Later, Dean would admit, "yes, Bill, we were trying to
feminize you." Today, he says that, despite my gawkiness, I have
a lot of "warmth" and commends my independent (rather than
"passive") femininity. I knew intellectually what this meant: I
would get in touch with what made me tick and come alive, which
would not stop with a conditioned visceral and visual response to
sexually attractive young men, or even with "platonic" crushes on
them, but evolve into the real experience of surrender. Paul had,
after all, characterized himself as "earthy"; otherwise, his
mental preparations would level off into defenses.

Therapy-giving was supposed to be an experience at giving
tough love, not just in cool, distant, professional "competence."
The distrust that Center devotees held for "credentials" carried
far beyond the mental health profession (which, after all, had
just reversed its stand on homosexuality in 1973). It was
commonly held that statements about psychological truths from the
position of academic or otherwise recognized authority, loyalty
and accomplishment, were inevitably tainted. Human science
behaved like quantum mechanics; the observer tended to get in the
way with his psychological defenses. The "establishment" came to
be seen as part of an "evil" and "immoral" world. Truth and right
could only be found among one's immediate community of true
students; the Center came to be seen as a refuge for social
Ludditism. The conventional "mental health" world that had
captured me, however, seemed only capable of focusing on
pathology. Even other gay psychologists of that period had fallen
for it.
(14)

I interviewed to join a "closed" talk group sponsored by a gay
couple. I snowed the "masculine" guy by reporting my process of
feeling (for imaginary icons) and the inner intensity this
process generated. The "feminine" partner, who, like me, had
emphasized in the open talk groups that he had never
experienced sex with a woman, scolded me for hiding my feelings
behind abstract, inquisitive banter. My compulsiveness had driven
me back into sheltered conventionality and "automaticity." I
needed to think about whether I really could grow at all, and get
outside of myself. People who can't grow are much better off
straight! "Look, Bill, you fool a lot of people, and I'm not
going to let you get away with it!. . . Would you
support another person so that he could compose a piano sonata?"
No, I want to do that myself! "Don't you understand what the guy
washing the dishes is doing; you think he's dull, but really he
is very disciplined. So, Bill, where are you going with this?
Have you cried about it yet? Why not?. . . You
need to be sponged off of, and have somebody to make a home for
besides yourself." (OK, I needed to learn to give and not worry
about what I would get.) I remember walking home shaking in the
chill October evening to my sheltering loft in the Cast Iron
Building after that one. I had been as shocked by the chewing out
as I had been by the nurse after that gym class incident in ninth
grade. I had always sensed my own tremendous potential, and it
seemed to grow out of my deviance, my need to find not just
romantic fulfillment but a kind of musical cadence in a "lover."
I liked the idea of being on my own, and that my homosexuality
forced me to absorb the world on my own; in personal life,
difficult problems and ambiguous goals created the opportunity to
have a space to cover my grandiose intentions that one day would
seduce the outside public. Conversely, the need to achieve
something special had practically forced me into homosexuality;
the NIH psychiatrists had already figured that out. There was an
expanse to all of this, from the beatnik, crowded Village where
an adolescent, virile excitement loomed everywhere, to the
manicured, proper but sheltering and isolating suburbs where real
grownups pretended to live. It could all fit together in one
whole, some day. But it wasn't working! I just wouldn't focus.
One horrible Sunday afternoon, a millstone who had collared me at
the Center took me to the Ninth Circle Tavern for dinner and
confronted me with, "the way you look, how do you think you will
find a lover? The people who find somebody for life are all
straight." But I had already noticed that some people seemed
really "alive" and others, who sometimes created confrontations
resulting in their being asked to leave the Center, came across
as pedantic, repetitious, and inert. In a couple of years, the
Center had a reputation "on the Outside" (such as at a larger
counseling center, Identity House) as a cult with Paul the guru.
The Center had turned itself into a non-residential, evening-only
commune; perhaps the whole group constituted a virtual ashram.

January 1975, almost two years after my "second coming," I
finally experienced sex for the first time at the Club Baths.
So what if I were a fallen male!

Living six blocks from the popular West Village bars, I had
looked forward to the ritual of going out into the night and
looking for intimacy and vicarious perfection, in men whose looks
excited me. I would stop into Julius's and one man would take a
whole night play-acting Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with
Rama. Another would lecture on why he thought Asian men
always preferred Mediterranean Caucasians like himself. It was
almost another year, a New Years night, until I brought home a
"trick." Again, I got another lecture, this time about the "abuse
of the media," but I enjoyed the tenderness; the young man tried
to contact me again and turned out to be quite unstable. In the
next seven years I would sometimes have another man in my bed for
the night. A few of the "experiences" were really good. One man,
after sex, excused himself to the bathroom to freebase heroin;
but most of the men I met seemed to be stable and productive. One
would go on to become a Broadway actor. Still another friend, and
capable chess player, related to me a story of sexual abuse
against him as a juvenile in a New York State welfare facility,
not unlike the events depicted in the recent film
Sleepers. In Dallas, the saloons and discos were much
grander, sometimes guarded by men riding shotgun next to
flamboyant signs warning the public: "GAY BAR."

There is an even more disturbing moral lesson to all of this.
You won't have a meaningful life and matter to other people
unless you can meet their real needs. You should be selective,
but objective, too. In the Center talk groups, caring about other
people was put as a foundation of creativity. But this isn't just
the cheap talk of caring; it is the work that follows the initial
feelings or drives. People get turned on -- infatuated -- by the
superficial trappings and swagger of others (the projections of
their own imagined ideals), as if these external things are
really what matter and "make a man" (or woman) after all. Real
love, say the clinical psychologists, comes with being able to
give the other person's best interest top priority.
(15)
How facile! Even so, it matters whether one
can maintain a sense of real passion
(16)
for
another person as the visual or other sensual and imaginary
fascination, however naughty, fades. It takes a real "man" to
keep an intimate relationship together for a lifetime and really
care about it. A recent radio ad claims, "it takes a real
man to be a dad." The hidden phobia attracting the pundits
of Kulturkampf is the possibility of not being able to get
it up if your "beloved" rings your intercom after falling from
grace. I know the feeling. After one brief relationship in New
York ended, an acquaintance at Julius's cynically told me, "when
you fall in love, it's because the person fulfills a fantasy.
Love is in you, never your lover."
(17)
My stares
of admiration create even more uneasiness in others if they
realize that I'm mentally placing them in some imaginary
hierarchy.

In time, I found myself talking circles in the groups at the
Center, and decided to stop going. Indeed, I had clung to the
place as a shelter from the brutal, competitive and sometimes
untidy world of sucking and fucking. Yet, I made several good
friends there, some of whom I would stay in contact with for
years, even today. For example, only a few weeks after moving
into New York I met a sculptor who had his own studio on the
Upper West Side. He reported an adventurous life, of having been
wounded as a civilian combat photographer in Vietnam, and then
having traveled alone through Nepal and India. "I needed to be
alone," he said more than once. We did a barter deal: I gave him
an old Miracord turntable and speakers in exchange for a
sculpture of a Siamese-twin hive-owned extraterrestrial, which
still hangs in my living room today. In time, I learned that a
certain tension between me and any friend I really cared about
gave me more sense of life than would any sexual release; often,
sex would just spoil things. Another friend would move with his
lover to San Francisco; when he picked me up at the airport
during an October 1987 visit he melodramatically pulled his car
over to the interstate highway shoulder to tell me the stock
market had crashed!

I would revisit the Center sporadically over the ensuing
years. Going back for an evening would seem like a psychological
homecoming from my Star Trek lifestyle. It would lose its own
space in 1991, although it still sponsors occasional discussion
and study groups in rented spaces and members' apartments in
Manhattan.

"Outside" the Ninth Street Center, gay organizations in the
1970's seemed juvenile.
(18)
I would hear
speakers boast things like, "let's list the ways gays are
oppressed," or "I didn't choose to be the way I am."

During the same time period, conservative writer George Gilder
was publishing his own counter psychological theory of "polarity"
in Sexual Suicide (1973)
(19)
and Men and
Marriage (1986).
(20)
His proposition is that women
are biologically superior to men because childbearing and
nurturing provide natural satisfaction without the help of men
(after insemination). But men do need women, who tie them
to their own progeny. Marriage tames men, after they have been
brought up to protect society as hunter-gatherers or
warrior-barbarians. (An accurate restatement of Gilder's idea
would be, "love tames men.") In Gilder's world, men don't become
"individuals" -- and break away from collective hunting and
warrior activities -- until they marry and father. A married
average Joe, because he has real people (his own family)
who need him as he ages, lives longer than a singleton.
The importance of marriage for raising healthy children is almost
secondary. The breakdown of gender roles -- through the expansion
of workplace and even military opportunities for women and
perhaps the decline of male requirements such as the draft -- and
particularly of the importance of connecting sex to procreation
in marriage, all make marginal or "average" men feel expendable.
Furthermore, the breakdown of monogamy -- the inclination of a
"sexual princess" to steal away a successful "older man" as a
rich, proven husband with the ease of divorce -- means that it is
harder for less talented men to find wives. Gilder even believes
that the breakdown of marital monogamy causes homosexuality
through the same mechanism that works in prisons. Other, less
polished writers, would contribute cheap refrains moaning the
erosion of "masculinity."
(21)

Much later, in 1993, Warren Farrell would combine the ideas
like those of Gilder and Rosenfels in The Myth of Male Power:
Why Men are the Disposable Sex.
(22)
(Actually, one
of the students at the Ninth Street Center, Jack Nichols, had
written on a similar theme in 1972 with Men's Liberation).
Farrell travels the country and gives seminars in the dynamics on
expanding psychological roles (such as nurturing in men) in
heterosexually married couples. He describes a progression
between "Stage I" and "Stage II" societies
(23)
where
individual fulfillment (balanced against responsibility)
gradually replaces survival, where the technology that
facilitates fulfillment actually requires changing male warrior
conditioning, and where new notions of individuality can be
taught to couples.

Even more "political" writers would gradually weave psychology
into their principals. Jonathan Rauch would characterize the
derivation of truth and right through a process he calls "liberal
science." Rauch criticizes, first, the authoritarian
("fundamentalist") model where "absolute" truth gives its
original owner not just right but might, and then the
"humanitarian" threat which suppresses disturbing or "offensive"
discussion. Liberal science can go astray when it winds up
deciding truth by popularity or financial results. Rauch
concludes, "Competitive and consensual public checking of each by
each through criticism and questioning is the only legitimate way
to decide who is right."
(24)
That is, everyone
should join in the debate and search for truth and right.

Other progressive writers would apply these ideas in practical
human relations. Charles Murray would comment on the
psychological rewards and benefits that accrue from caring for
other people (rather than just supporting them), first with
family but also with friends.
(25)

Psychological polarity theories have been published in Germany, by various psychologists associated with the Humboldt Society of Mannheim. Other writers include Carl Jung, Geoffrey Sainsbury and Alan Watts.

Martin Hoffman, The Gay World: Male Homosexuality and the Social Creation of Evil (New York: Bantam, 1968). Hoffman describes pretty well the old-fashioned ideas of Freud, as exploited later by Bieber and Socarides.

For another account of the
Center and other gay groups during this time, see
Ian Young,
The Stonewall Experiment: A Gay Psychohistory (London: Cassell Wellington, 1995). Rosenfels's work was discussed from time to time by writers such as John Hudson (Gay Magazine, 1974) D. F. Lawden (Psychoenergetics: The Journal of Psychophysical Systems, Vol. 4, #1m 1981), Judy Chicurel (Gay Magazine, 1983), Jay Bolcik (New York Native, June 1, 1987).